Finance

WeWork reported its financials for 2018 and both its revenue — and losses — doubled

Adam Neumann wework we company ceo
Adam Neumann, CEO of The We Company. Jackal Pan via Reuters
Read in app

WeWork more than doubled its revenue, loss, and footprint last year, according to a financial presentation seen by Business Insider. 

The New York-based company, which offers office space to individuals and corporations alike, notched $1.82 billion in revenue and $1.93 billion in net loss.

See more: It took a day for WeWork's CEO to recover from the shock of a $16 billion SoftBank investment falling apart

WeWork president and chief financial officer Artie Minson told Axios that the revenue and losses would both continue to grow, with losses stemming from construction and long-term rental contract costs. 

"I was previously at [Time Warner Cable] and it took decades for cable companies to show profits, but that doesn't mean they weren't creating lots of value," Minson said. 

International growth buoyed the company's bottom line, accounting for more than 40% of revenue by the second half of 2018, up from just 28% in the first quarter of 2017. 

Overall, WeWork added 215,000 memberships last year, hitting 401,000 members. About a third of those memberships went to companies, an increasingly important business as WeWork seeks large, stable tenants like IBM looking for an office manager. The company also reported a $2.2 billion "revenue backlog" of contracts signed, largely driven by these enterprise-level agreements. 

The company now has 425 locations, up from 200 in 2017.

WeWork ended the year with $2.2 billion in cash. 

The company also included in its figures a non-standard metric it calls "community-adjusted EBITDA," which has raised some eyebrows. This figure is essentially intended to show that WeWork would be profitable, excluding the costs it requires to create those profits – such as 2018's $372 million in sales and marketing expenses. Last year, the company hit $467 million community-adjusted EBITDA, up from $233 million in 2017. 

By the more-standard metric of adjusted EBITDA, the company lost $666 million last year, compared with $193 million in losses in 2017.

Read next

Meghan Morris's face on a gray background
Meghan Morris
Meghan is the bureau chief in Singapore. She oversees business, lifestyle, and news coverage and leads the company's local hiring and editorial strategy.Singapore's bureau works on global news during Asia's daytime. They also collect tales from around the region about entrepreneurs, Big Tech work culture, FIRE, relocation, consumer trends, and AI, focused on people-centric storytelling.Before moving to Singapore in 2024, Meghan worked in NYC and SF as a senior correspondent, writing deeply-reported business investigations. If you have sensitive information, please email her from a nonwork email or reach out on secure messaging app Signal at @MeghanEMorris.1 (PR pitches only by email.)She enjoys speaking about tech, finance, and news on television, at conferences, and on podcasts. Please email for booking.These are some of her favorite features she has written over the years:She spent the 2022-23 academic year doing Columbia University's Knight-Bagehot Fellowship, where she took courses in statistics, advanced corporate finance, family office management, and other classes at Columbia Business School. During her fellowship, she also led MBA seminars on due diligence and brought Pulitzer-winning authors to the business school.Before she joined Business Insider in 2018, she wrote about private equity real estate for three years at the industry's trade magazine, PERE. Meghan holds bachelor's and master's journalism degrees from Northwestern University.